UNDER THE NAZIS' NOSES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 249, 31 March 1944, Page 7

UNDER THE NAZIS' NOSES

Bold Hoax By Belgian Patriots

FEW days ago, the BBC broadcast an account of a bold adventure carried out by Belgian patriots in Brussels last November-the printing and distribution of one issue of Le Soir, their own daily paper. Reception at the time was so bad that even M. Armand Nihotte, the Belgian Consul-General in New Zealand, who would have known the names of places and Quislings who were mentioned, could not follow the thread of the broadcast, but it so happened that only a few days before he had received through his own diplomatic service a photographic copy of the famous issue. The Listener called on M. Nihotte and saw these two sheets, facsimiles of a paper which is worth £5 a copy in Belgium now. Belgium has about 200

patriotic papers which are produced in secret, he told us, most of them quite regularly, and some very well produced and supplied with news. But the thing that distinguishes this one issue of Le Soir is the extraordinary way in which it was circulated-through the very hands of the sellers of the German paper of the same name. When Belgium was overpowered, Le Soir refused, with other papers, to continue under German censorship, It was seized, and continued to be published from the same office, with the same paper, and the same plant, but not quite the same outlook. The Belgians called the ersatz paper "Emboché"-Bochefied. Bogus-Ersatz-Soir Last year Brussels patriots decided that they would celebrate the anniversary of Armistice Day by bringing out a bogus-ersatz-Soir. Anyone who knows the organisation necessary to produce one copy of a big daily under ordinary circumstances will appreciate the enormous skill and organisation that must have been necessary to do it in secretto reproduce the format, type, and paper

so exactly that it could be thrown to "collaborateur" street-sellers from lorries without their realising that it was a patriot product, and sold by them as the German article, At all events, this was done, and on November 9 last year th? German-employed sellers got their papers a little earlier than usual, cried their usual cry, and sold their copies for a while, until a second lot came, or until someone saw what a hoax had been perpetrated. At the top left corner of the front page is an advertisement that must have seemed just the usual thing to the Belgian reader; in another position it would not seem out of the ordinary to any New Zealander: TERRIBLE PAIN IN THE LEGS: H.M. writes, 20.1.40: Your preparation has done me a great service ,.. I was delighted to be able to leave my bed and start work afresh... But one of the main stories, headed "Effective Strategy," with the catchline "Special Correspondent, Berlin," starts as follows: To make this officious comment on military operations more intelligible, we must recall the principal sources to which we commonly have access-Well-informed Berlin milit circles, Generally well-informed Berlin Military circles. Competent circles, Lea ind spheres. The highest authorities. The most noted personalities of the capital. The man-in-the-street-in-ruins, : The soldier of the pierced front line, "No one denies in Berlin, where the a ent calm veils a certain anxiety not devoid of some vague fear, that operations in the east have entered-or will enter, according to the angle from which one views the situation-a new phase which is scarcely different from the preceding phase, in spite of certain changes, marked at the time by brutal surprises... . ." This was obviously the product of some journalist who has "subbed" many a tiresome cable and waded through columns of non-commital phraseology, having his own shot at it, parodying and ridiculing for the amusement of his depressed but hopeful compatriots, Undergraduate Humour Most of the humour of this interpolated Soir is rough undergraduate stuff -the inverted block, producing a big black mass, purporting to be Hitler in an air raid using the Kaiser’s phrase, "Dass habe ich nicht gewohlt"-"It wasn’t my doing"; the theatre advertisements showing new films at all the well-known theatres: Acropolis: "Red October," or The Corpse Factory: cultural documentary with General Paulus and his soldiers (the few who remain). Ambassador; Olympic Games, first Part, the Marathon from El Alemein to Sidi Birrani, with Rommel in his Greatest Role, There is the note in the minor accident column: We reported last Saturday the unpleasant accident that occurred to an elderly woman, and said that she died through falling into a septic tank, It should have read Mees 4 walking into the Pays Reel" (office of a Quisling newspaper). Our readers will have realised what was meant, ; The humour, as we say, is crude stuff. But if it is true, as many believe, that a single laugh is worth a whole sea of indignation, it probably didn’t matter to the most sensitive Belgian how the laugh was provoked. For one day, the citizen of Brussels was able to feel he had his own daily paper back again.